In digital pathology (DP) applications, it is very often that the objects of interest (nuclei, cells, fluorescent in-situ hybridization (FISH) dots, Quantum dots, etc.) have to be segmented in multiple channel (or component) images, either obtained directly under different optical spectrum or indirectly from one or multiple color images obtained under different spectrum distribution from the same tissue section or consecutive tissue sections. The segmentation is carried out on the channels one after another and the final segmentation result(s) is (are) the aggregation of the results from all or a subset of these images. Often times, the same object can have footprints in more than one of these images and the desired outcome sometimes is to eliminate the repetition of the objects although true overlap of different objects is possible. A widely used conventional solution is to set the intensity values inside objects that have already been obtained in one or more processed channels to a fixed low value in the subsequent images, based on biological grounds or other considerations. This approach creates steep “holes,” which means unnatural transitions between foreground and background. It leads to distorted image features being used for further image analysis or classification. In the worst case, it can even create artificial islands where nuclei from processed images form a closed loop, which leads to an identification of artificial objects that may be difficult to discriminate.